<climbs on soapbox>
This is just a warning to other government employees. This is nothing more than my experience. Hopefully employee's in other commands will not have this issue...
At about 1400 yesterday afternoon, my computer gave me the message that I had lost my connection to the local area network. I went down to inform the IT staff of the issue. They told me that there wasnt any network outages and that everyone was "up" on the network. I told them that I was certainly not on the network and after about 10-15 minutes, he was able to confirm that that was indeed that case. His guidance was to go back to my office and he would help me shortly.
5 minutes later he and another gentleman come into my office claiming that they need to confiscate my computer and my personal thumb drive that was attached to a lanyard worn around my neck. (As a point of reference, the computer is a completely unclassified machine.) I was told that my computer had tripped their IDS--Intrusion Detection System. This surprised me because all the work I was doing was on the level so I queried further about what would set off IDS.
I was again surprised to find out that a FAT32 formatted thumb drive would trigger their IDS. Of course as I am being told this, he also mentions that my personal thumb drive is now property of the US Government.
I asked about what the next action is and he told me "hes looking into it." I then asked who initiates the next action in this process me or him. He responded with the definitive "a little bit of both." At that point they both left. That was Tuesday afternoon and I have not heard back from them since then. I tried to make contact several times today but the IT office has been absolutely empty.
I dont know what the next step is. Im sure it will involve some lengthy amount of training and other corrective action. But this experience was full of unprofessionalism. To make matters even more interesting, there is no feedback loop for a customer (myself) to comment on the quality of service from our IT staff. So it looks like my opportunities to voice my experience will be limited as well.
So if you read this, consider yourself forewarned of the dangers of using a personal thumb drive on government machine.
<gets off soapbox>